Is 'the left' blaming the victim?

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

Blaming the victims


< j.freedland@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx >
Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday September 19, 2001
The Guardian

The cruellest, sickest response to the calamity of September 11 has
come from an unexpected quarter. Not from America's traditional
enemies, but from within. Voiced not by Muslim radicals consumed with
hatred for the Great Satan, but by two self-styled American
super-patriots.

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the grand old men of America's
Christian right, were swift to tell Americans who was to blame. "The
abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will
not be mocked," Falwell, onetime leader of the Moral Majority, told
Robertson as they sat together on the latter's Christian Broadcasting
Network. "I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and
the feminists and the gays and lesbians... I point the finger in their
face and say: 'You helped this happen'."

Of all the multiple uglinesses of that diatribe, perhaps the worst is
Falwell's cardinal moral error, blaming the victims. Most people know
that, when a woman is raped or an ethnic minority is persecuted, there
is nothing more insidious than asking questions about the prior
conduct of those who suffered. It implies a causal connection: you
behaved like this and that was the result. It says, you had it coming.
We can see the horror of that suggestion when it comes from the likes
of Falwell and Robertson. But we may not be so vigilant when those we
admire on the liberal left edge close to the same, victim-blaming
terrain. For just as the televangelists held America responsible for
last week's American tragedy, so have a procession of progressive
luminaries and their supporters (including on these pages) - albeit
for radically different reasons.

To the audience of last week's Question Time, for example, it was not
America's permissiveness toward abortion and gay rights that was the
problem, but US foreign policy in the Middle East and the developing
world. Of course the former view is bonkers while the latter has logic
and considerable evidence on its side. Even so, the anger,
self-righteousness and sheer insensitivity directed at America has
been a match for the callousness of those TV preachers. Glance at the
New Statesman editorial this week, which asks whether the Americans
incinerated in the World Trade Centre were "as innocent and as
undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants" and answers,
"Well, yes and no."

The offensiveness here rests on three counts. First, the timing
stinks. Only hours after the catastrophe, surely it was time to do
what most Britons were doing: standing in the shoes of the bereaved.
The immediate aftermath of the attack felt like a moment for mourning,
reflection and grief. Those first, dazed days were not the right time
for a searching analysis of US foreign policy - let alone for a finger
wagged in the face of the American people, telling them they are
loathed the world over.

The second, related offence was tone. Almost any argument can be made
without lapsing into bad taste - but one needs to keep an ear
especially open to language when the rubble is still smouldering and
more than 5,000 loved ones are still missing. Too many on the left
forgot the first task of the progressive: to feel compassion for their
fellow human being. The vitriol hurled at Americans, even while they
still wept, should be a source of shame. The line between explaining
an atrocity, which is an essential task, and excusing it is fuzzy and
requires vigilant policing - a vigilance lacking these last few days.

But the most serious flaw in this "blame America" critique is its
substance. It's not that the US record abroad is not filled with
appalling atrocities - coups planned and executed, whole continents
destabilised, vile regimes propped up. But the claim that it is these
specifics which have driven the Islamic world insane with rage is
shaky at best.

Take the first two charges on the anti-American rap sheet: the
decade-long US war on Iraq and the US military presence in Saudi
Arabia. They sound like convincing provocations until one remembers
that America was branded the Great Satan long before either
development: the stars and stripes were burned and US embassy
officials taken hostage in Tehran 22 years ago. Also: if the US army's
presence in Saudi Arabia so incenses Islamic fundamentalists then why
do they never target the Saudi royal family, which invited the
Americans in as protectors against Saddam Hussein in the first place?
Nor do these advocates ever address those bits of the US record which
don't fit the America-against-Islam thesis. The Americans intervened
twice in the Balkans in the last decade - both times on the side of
Muslims who faced ethnic cleansing. (When the US did that,
incidentally, the same crowd opposed them then, too.)

Above all, we're told, it is American support for Israel which so
enrages the developing world. Yet that argument hardly seems to stack
up. It was George Bush Sr who took the hardest line on Israel -
denying $10bn of loan guarantees in pursuit of a freeze on settlement
activity - and yet he was as hated across the Middle East as any other
US president.

No, there is a naivete in all these attempts to explain the fury that
burst forth on September 11. They seem to suggest that if only the US
pursued a different foreign policy, the hijackers would never have
boarded those planes. Yet if Washington dropped the sanctions against
Baghdad and pulled out of Saudi tomorrow, would it really make any
difference? Wouldn't the hatreds on display in Iran in 1979 still be
there?

Equally, would a change of tack on Israel really alter much? The
commentators may believe it is US support for Israel's 34-year-old
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that so angers Islamic
fundamentalists. But, once again, they are naive. Last Tuesday's
hijackers and the people who inspire them are not opposed to the
post-1967 occupation: they are opposed to Israel's very existence,
which they regard as an alien Jewish incursion into what should be
Muslim lands. Only American support for that position - total
eradication of the Jewish state - would begin to placate them.

There is a kind of comfort in imagining the fault for last Tuesday
lies in America's hands, because so then does the solution. That was
Falwell's gospel and it is the New Statesman's too. The US merely has
to shake off its evil ways and all will be well. But this is a false
comfort. The harsher truth may be that America's offence consists of
things it cannot do much to alter: its wealth, its modernity, its
centrality in the global capitalist order, its brash westernness, its
existence as an opposite pole to everything fundamentalist Islam
stands for. Sure, it could tweak its foreign policy and it would be
cosy to think that would prevent future atrocities. But the scarier
truth might be that America is hated just for itself. And there is
little it can do about that.

Progressives need to recognise this, and tone down the anti-American
invective, if they are to make headway in the struggle to come. We may
well want to challenge a wrong-headed response to September 11, should
President Bush stick to his "wanted dead-or-alive" and "crusade"
rhetoric and make a dangerous move. But mainstream US ears will be
closed to our pleas if we can be dismissed as callous critics who were
never capable of sympathy, only blame.